In Jon Per’s “GOP a threat to U.S. economy, say economists” at Daily Kos, he writes, “While all eyes have been focused on the worldwide stock market plunge, a recent survey of economists by the Wall Street Journal identified a different threat to the vitality of the U.S. economy. But it’s not the instability of Chinese stock prices, the devaluation of our currency, the Eurozone’s Greek tragedy, or even a premature Fed interest rate hike that has WSJ’s economists so concerned. Instead, the fear is that the GOP-controlled Congress will once again precipitate a fiscal crisis this fall.”
It doesn’t sound like the Vice President and his family are ready for yet another run for the White House. A remarkably candid admission from Vice President Biden about his “emotional fuel” deficit will leave many lamenting that such honesty, sanity and soul are exactly what is missing — and needed — in American politics.
Jeb Bush is giving Trump a run for the GOP’s gaffer-in-chief.
After giving Jesse Jackson due credit for his energetic and inspiring leadership, this post seems overstated and somewhat backwards in that Rev. Jackson’s influence was more a product of demographic transformations than a self-contained game-changer.
Ashley Lopez explains why “Why Republicans Might Not Get A Voter Turnout Surge in Kentucky Next Year.”
At Slate.com Jamelle Bouie argues that Trump is tapping into a vast undercurrent of public animosity toward wealthy donors, lobbyists and special interests corrupting American politics. “In an analysis for the Democratic Strategist and the Washington Monthly published earlier this year, pollster Stan Greenberg drew a connection between the high-dollar fundraising of modern political campaigns and the deep government distrust from working-class whites, working-class white men in particular…For Greenberg, it’s this–more than anything else in politics–that fuels anti-government cynicism. …There’s almost no chance that Trump or his team has read Greenberg. But if Greenberg is right–and millions of Americans are open to an explicit message against the wealthy donors and fundraisers that dominate American politics–then Trump’s message of financial independence could be his key to a broader constituency.”
At The Guardian Daniel Pena explains why “It’s not just Trump: Latinos should boycott the Republican party en masse” and notes, “”Illegal” and “Mexican” have come to be used interchangeably by both Republican supporters and the candidates themselves. This should set off alarm bells in the minds of Latino voters and Americans everywhere. The Republican Party is not designed to include people like us. And it’s quickly becoming a promoter of and platform for white supremacist, hate group rhetoric.”
Meanwhile, Washington Post editorial writer Harold Meyerson has a primer for the media who will be conducting “the next GOP debate” and notes “the insularity of the discourse in conservative media is such that economic issues on which substantial numbers and, on occasion, majorities of Republicans agree with their Democratic and independent compatriots are rarely brought up for fear they’ll run afoul of GOP political correctness. It’s all the more incumbent for the moderators in the upcoming Republican debates to pose such questions.”
At Moyers & Company Richard Schiffman’s interview with Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes probes a question of increasing importance to progressives, “How Do We Get People to Care About Climate Change?” Says Stoknes, “There are five main psychological barriers: distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identity…And the reason climate science communication is so difficult is that it triggers these barriers one after the other.”

Most of the Republican presidential candidates have wised up to the point where they don’t call for outright privatization of Social Security any more. But as the stock market heads south, they should not be allowed to evade their records as ardent supporters of various cuts in Social Security. As Sahil Kapur reports at Bloomberg Politics:

As they barnstorm the country trying to win supporters, Republican presidential hopefuls are regularly talking up the need to “save” Social Security by cutting it..But, in what may be an example of political prescience — or, at the very least, reason for political relief — given Monday’s stock market swoon, they’ve been mysteriously silent about one issue that many conservatives support: privatization. Instead of calling for private accounts that give seniors the ability to invest their Social Security benefits, with all the potential for reward and risk that implies, many of this year’s Republican candidates are calling for maintaining the structure of the popular federally-managed retirement program. Their plans for saving money: Making benefits less generous.

You may remember Jeb’s brother’s big push for privatization. Now, however, the GOP presidential wannabes are pretty quiet about cutting Social Security, compared to their stated positions quite recently. As Kapur notes,

This month in Iowa, Jeb Bush said he opposes the plan to privatize Social Security backed by his brother, former President George W. Bush. “It would’ve made sense back then. Now we’re we beyond that,” he said, calling for raising the retirement age and income-based means testing. Florida Senator Marco Rubio regularly discusses the need for Social Security changes like lifting the eligibility age for people under 55 and slowing the growth of benefits, but he doesn’t mention privatization. Texas Senator Ted Cruz backed private accounts as “transformative” during an April interview with CNBC, but he seldom, if ever, discusses it on the campaign trail.

Further, Bryce Covert reports at Think Progress, via Nation of Change:

In June, presidential candidate Jeb Bush said that he thinks the next president will have to try to privatize Social Security. Others have gotten behind the idea as well: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) drafted a plan in 2013 that included partial privatization, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is in favor of using private accounts. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has included privatization in his budget blueprints.

But don’t be fooled by the silence on Social Security among the GOP candidates. Social Security cuts and even privatization will resurface again, embedded as they are in the GOP’s DNA. As Kapur explains, “It continues to have strong support among Wall Street donors, influential fiscal conservatives and congressional Republican leaders. The lesson from the 2005 debacle was about branding.”
As for the Democrats, Kapur explains “Democrats, meanwhile, strongly oppose any kind of privatization of Social Security and generally oppose cutting the program at all. They’ve instead proposed addressing the long-term problems by raising the cap on income that is subject to Social Security payroll tax.” And with good reason, as Covert explains:

“What’s beautiful about Social Security is that in the long the return workers get on contributions is linked to productivity growth and wage growth,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Whereas markets are notoriously volatile and often behave in ways that are not based on the fundamental strength and weakness of the economy.”
Americans are already affected by those ups and downs of the stock market through their 401(k) savings, which have skyrocketed in recent decades. Privatizing Social Security would increase the risks they have to take on. “We have a system where workers are already far too exposed to the vagaries of the stock market,” Morrissey said. “We don’t need to be expanding that.”
…”The last stock market plunge in 2008 actually was the nail in the coffin of the idea of privatization,” Morrissey said. “It became very visceral for all the people who lost a huge amount of money in 401(k) plans.” But Republicans still seem intent on bringing the issue back to life.

You won’t hear much from Republican presidential candidates about the need for cutting Social Security until the memory of this latest stock market plunge begins to fade, and then they will crank up the cuts and privatization talk again. Democratic campaigns, however, ought to remind the public where the GOP candidates, presidential and otherwise, stand on Social Security as often as possible. Failure to do so would be political malpractice.

A.P.’s Erica Werner reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is considering “a major role in Democratic primaries in key congressional races nationally, which could produce weakened nominees who would be more easily defeated by Republicans, according to an internal memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.” Werner says the Chamber is targeting Democratic primaries for 4 senate races (IL, OH, FL and PA) and 5 house races for possible involvement.
According to the International Institute for Democracy, “if you define voter turnout as the ratio of voters compared to the entire population of citizens eligible to vote, then for presidential elections, the U.S. lately ranks 75th (with 53.58 percent of eligible voters turning out) if you focus only on the 113 countries with presidential elections.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. succinctly defines the current assault on voting rights: “Mr. Obama’s election called forth a far more sophisticated approach to restricting voting. Republicans closely examined how Mr. Obama’s political organization had turned out large numbers of young African-Americans who had not voted before. Their participation was facilitated by early voting, and particularly Sunday voting…So legislatures in many states where Republicans had full political control went to work to make it harder for African-Americans, Latinos and young people to vote. Of course, that is not what they said they were doing.”
Columnist Doyle McManus terms Hillary Clinton’s strategy “soft populism”…not the insurrectionist socialism of Bernie Sanders but still progressive enough to keep most Democratic primary voters on her side.”
At The Plum Line Paul Waldman probes “The simple-minded populism that controls the GOP,” and notes, “Democratic populism says that the problem is largely about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and on whose behalf it’s wielded…Republican populism, on the other hand, is aimed against “elites” that are decidedly not economic. It’s the egghead professors, the Hollywood liberals, the government bureaucrats whom they tell their voters to resent and despise. ”
Jonathan Chait distills the Rubio pitch and then shreds it in his New York Magazine column “Marco Rubio: Let Me Be Your Front Man, Republicans.” Chait explains: “Republicans who favor tax cuts for the rich, cuts in social benefits for working-class Americans, and deregulation of Wall Street…What these donors want is a candidate who will continue to advocate the fiscal and regulatory policies they crave…Rubio is all but explicitly making the case for himself as the front man to make that sale.”
Former Sen. Kay Hagan has decided not to run for the U.S Senate seat now occupied by NC Republican Richard Burr, who many observers of NC politics believe to be one of the more vulnerable senators up from re-election in 2016. There are some less well-known potential challengers, with the usual concerns about fund-raising in a shrinking window of time. More here.
Lee Drutman has some interesting observations at Vox Polyarchy about “What Donald Trump Gets About the Electorate.” Citing a study showing that “the dominant left-right/liberal-conservative divide in American politics doesn’t fit a large number of voters,” Drutman says “While most elite-funded and elite-supported Republicans want to increase immigration and decrease Social Security, a significant number of voters (across both parties) want precisely the opposite — to increase Social Security and decrease immigration. So when Trump speaks out both against immigration and against fellow Republicans who want to cut Social Security, he’s speaking out for a lot people….By my count of National Election Studies (NES) data, 24 percent of the US population holds this position (increase Social Security, decrease immigration). If we add in the folks who want to maintain (not cut) Social Security and decrease immigration, we are now at 40 percent of the total electorate, which I’ll call “populist.”
Somebody has a serious message discipline problem.

Here we have yet another example of a Republican trying to leverage Black Lives Matter in service to the GOP Agenda.
This time a writer for RedState and Townhall.com, Leon H. Wolf, argues that abuses by law enforcement are mostly about bloated “big government” budgets, ever the most-favored GOP whipping boy. He lobs in cherry-picked numbers which distract from the fact that it’s a bogus notion from the get-go that somehow, smaller law enforcement budgets will magically eliminate police abuses.
A more grounded program to help eliminate racism and violence in law enforcement championed by Democratic leaders is needed. Certainly Dems should call, loud, clear and repeatedly for more body cameras, video monitoring groups and citizen-staffed police review/oversight boards, which have had considerable success in some localities across the U.S. Democrats should urge adoption of better screening and recruitment of law enforcement, checking racial prejudice and attitudes toward violence to tighten up recruitment and hiring standards.
But there should also be more rigorous training in peaceful conflict-resolution for all law enforcement personnel, including reworking ‘rules of engagement’ with suspects to encourage nonviolent outcomes. There must be increasing participation of people of color and women in law-enforcement policy-making, as well as among police officials and rank and file. Additionally, Democrats should advocate raising the percentage of police who don’t carry lethal weapons and work with community organizations.
Democrats should prioritize these and other reforms. And yes, such reforms might cost a little extra. But not as much as the cost of lawsuits and policing the protests — peaceful and rioting alike — that will come with doing nothing. Then there are the hidden costs of decaying and neglected communities, which require infrastructure upgrades to put people to work at livable wages. Few Republican elected officials are willing to discuss, let alone support major, nationwide infrastructure projects, or even realize that law enforcement IS a critical element of the infrastructure needed to rebuild America.
Black Lives Matter has put the imperative of fundamental criminal justice/law enforcement reform on the national agenda. And if this creative movement can help register hundreds of thousands of new voters in key swing states, needed reforms in law enforcement could become a reality.

“A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week found that fully 60 percent of millennials say government should do more to solve problems, rather than leaving things up to businesses and individuals. Only 37 percent say government shouldn’t shoulder more responsibility,” reports Tom Shoop at the National Journal.
Democrats should be forgiven of they pause to gloat, just for a moment. You may have seen several articles during the last week or so, like this one, about how generally devoid of anything resembling substance are the debates going on between the GOP candidates. Nothing to be surprised about, when you consider the ‘claims to fame’ of top Republican contenders: a brother of a former president who wrecked the world economy, a Koch brothers errand boy/union buster and an immigrant-bashing, misogynistic birther — and that’s the top tier.
Gloating aside, Jeb Bush’s super-PAC “Right to Rise USA” is springing for “an eight-figure ad buy in the early primary states.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides an astute observation about the Trump phenomenon in a global context: “Trumpism does have its uniquely American characteristics. Not many places would turn a loudmouthed real estate tycoon first into a television celebrity and then into a (temporarily, at least) front-running presidential candidate…a gift to us all from a raucous entrepreneurial culture that does not hold bad taste against someone as long as he is genuinely gifted at self-promotion…Trump is a symptom of a much wider problem in Western democracies. In country after country, traditional, broadly based parties and their politicians face scorn. More voters than usual seem tired of carefully focus-grouped public statements, deftly cultivated public personas and cautiously crafted political platforms that are designed to move just the right number of voters in precisely the right places to cast a half-hearted vote for a person or a party.”
Estimable political analysts Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley have designated Trump “The Un-Nominatable Frontrunner.”
Jim Rutenberg’s “Nine Years Ago, Republicans Favored Voting Rights. What Happened?,” follows up on his much-cited New York Times Magazine article, “A Dream Undone.” Rutenberg cites dim prospects for legislation to reinstate some of the voting rights weakened by the Shelby vs. Holder Supreme Court decision, which sparked a rash of Republican-driven voter suppression laws in the states. Only a Democratic presidential victory in 2016 can insure that the next Supreme Court justice will not be another advocate for voter suppression.
In an NPR interview, Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” makes it plain when asked “what is behind the wave of new voting restrictions”: “I think it’s an attempt by elements in the Republican Party to make the electorate older, whiter and more conservative as opposed to how the electorate was in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected, which was younger, more diverse and more progressive. If you look at the methods that Republicans are using to try to make it harder to vote, they disproportionately affect minority voters, younger voters who are the core of Obama’s coalition, but they also disproportionately target the methods that the Obama administration used so successfully to win election and then re-election.”
A new Jewish Journal poll, which includes Jews who are not religiously observant, indicates that 63 percent of respondents “of the three-quarters who said they knew enough to offer an opinion on the deal” support the Administration’s proposed lifting of sanctions against Iran in exchange for arms reduction.
Good luck with all that.

Republican strategists are understandably miffed that Donald Trump has degraded their brand with his bullying antics. But what they worry about more is the effects of Trump running as a write-in candidate.
If Trump loses the GOP nomination, runs as a write-in candidate after the primaries and draws, say, a net three or four percent of the vote away from the Republican nominee’s vote in a couple of key states, it could be enough to give a Democratic nominee the presidency.
After the primary season is over, Trump would likely run more as a centrist than a conservative, like other presidential candidates, and perhaps tone his theatrics down a notch.
At The Upshot Josh Barro argues that Trump is a moderate on some key issues. He has made vague statement of support for tax cuts and simplifying the tax code, but has so far refused to sign Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. Further,

The main way Mr. Trump stands out from the field on economic policy is leftward: While most Republicans favor free trade, Mr. Trump has called for much higher tariffs on imported goods to protect American industries from competition. He has also criticized his opponents for proposing cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
…..Instead of promoting his ideological purity, he notes that policy choices are circumstance-specific. For example, he’s not a priori opposed to single-payer health care. “It works in Canada,” he said at the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 6. “It works incredibly well in Scotland.” Even in the United States, “it could have worked in a different age,” but it wouldn’t work very well right now, he said. So instead, he’d replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” which would take care of people who can’t afford health insurance.

Timothy Noah notes at Politico:

It was during Trump’s leftward drift in 1999 that he first proposed a wealth tax — a one-time 14.25 percent levy on fortunes more than $10 million that inequality guru Thomas Piketty might salivate over. “The concept of a one-time tax on the super-wealthy is something he feels strongly about,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times.
“He’s nothing if not inconsistent,” said Bruce Bartlett, a onetime tax aide to the late Rep. Jack Kemp (R.-N.Y.) who excoriated Trump’s wealth tax 16 years ago in the Wall Street Journal. “He’s been on every side of every issue from every point of view as far as I can tell.”

Trump has worked with unions in his business and generally avoids the snarling anti-union tone of many of his fellow Republican candidates. However, notes Noah,

But even in 2000, Trump had a low regard for teacher’s unions, who he wrote “blow smoke about professional this and academic that” and stifle competition by resisting school choice options. Trump would also appear to share fellow GOP candidate Scott Walker’s disdain for public employee unions in general, having donated $15,000 during Walker’s 2012 recall fight to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which opposed it. “I believed what he was doing was the right thing,” Trump said…Trump parts with liberals in opposing an increase in the minimum wage…

Trump’s “leftward” credentials are more than a little compromised by his stated willingness to allow each state to formulate its own policies toward unions, rather than strengthen collective bargaining across the U.S., which many economists believe is needed to secure a thriving middle class. In substance, he is not so different than the others on the critical issue of restoring a healthy trade union movement. It’s ironic that Trump would take a moderate tone on any issues, including unions.
In a way, the Trump phenomenon is a test of just how far an in-your-face presidential candidate can go with policies that would disqualify other equally-‘moderate’ candidates with a less outrageous media profile. As Barro puts it

Mr. Trump is offering an unusual combination of extreme language, moderate policy and rudeness, and so far it’s connecting with Republican voters. Over the next few months, as voters learn more about Mr. Trump’s policy views, we’ll get to see which part of that combination is helping him soar, and whether his policy moderation and flexibility are liabilities.

Barro may be overstating Trump’s ‘moderation.’ It would be unwise to assume Trump would not vacillate again on his economic policies, since that’s been his pattern. His contradictions on policy make it hard to see how he could hold his own in a presidential debate.
But he has cleverly leveraged his outrageous media persona to catapult his candidacy to frontrunner status in the GOP, leaving his fellow presidential candidates flat-footed and unprepared. Most pundits still doubt he can win the Republican nomination — or the presidency. But If Trump can’t be the king, he could be a kingmaker.

At The Week Scott Lemieux examines the strategic flaws of a single-issue campaign — even when the cause is a very good one.
This is fun. At Politico Sen. Claire McCaskill explains “How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later.” from her book “Plenty Ladylike: A Memoir.”
At Roll Call’s Rothenblog, Nathan L. Gonzales notes “Democrats haven’t given up their effort to dig out of the minority in the House…Democrats face a difficult road to gain 30 seats and get back into the majority, but their prospects improved in a handful of races over the last few months.”
National Journal’s Alex Roarty, Andrea Drusch, Scott Bland and Josh Kraushaar present “Hotline’s Senate Rankings: The Senate Seats Most Likely to Flip in 2016,” and 10 of their top 12 are now held by Republicans.
From Gallup, a potentially-useful metric for identifying swing states: “The difference between the percentage of state residents identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic and the percentage identifying as Republicans or leaning Republican.” States closest to zero (and under +/- 2.0) include: NV, 0.5; LA, -0.5; OH, -0.7; CO, 1.3; AZ, -1.3; NC, 1.4; and WI, 1.6. Louisiana is the surprise — any theories?
Not such a big surprise: The disrupter of the Bernie Sanders rally reportedly supported Sarah Palin and the tea party.
Nate Silver explains why “Donald Trump Is Winning The Polls — And Losing The Nomination.” Among Silver’s most cogent insights: The polls “contemplate a winner-take-all vote, but most states are not winner-take-all.”
At The American Prospect Rachel M. Cohen reports on “The Growing Movement to Restore Voting Rights to Former Felons.” Cohen observes, “According to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group, there are roughly 5.85 million disenfranchised American citizens with felony convictions, and 2.2 million of them are black. That’s one out of every 13 African Americans…Eighteen states considered loosening ex-felon voting restrictions this year, up from 13 states in 2014. But passing legislation, as Maryland activists witnessed first-hand, is difficult. Only one state–Wyoming–ended up successfully loosening its restrictions.”
How a Georgia Democrat won a seat in the state legislature in a heavily-Republican district, and by a large margin, despite being outspent 2-1.

For an impressive expose of the Republicans’ disinformation complex, check out “They Don’t Gove a Damn About Governing: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party” by Jackie Calmes at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Here’s the real reason why Republicans so strongly advocate tightening up voter i.d. laws.
Trump’s support is stable in new NBC poll taken after the debates. “The big gainers were Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson,” reports Kevin Drum at Mother Jones..
At the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein explains why “Trump’s Shaky Electoral Foundation” is not likely to prevail, as suggested by the historical record.
Jonathan Chait has a perceptive summation the Trump threat to the GOP’s 2016 prospects: “…The significance of his performance lies in his deadly serious threat to run a third-party campaign, siphoning off the immigrant-haters and amorphously angry blue-collar whites the actual nominee will need for himself. The intense barrage of pointed questions displayed how seriously Roger Ailes takes Trump’s threat to hijack the GOP for his own end. It failed to reckon with the other threat: that the Republican plan to drive Trump from their party might instead work all too well.”
Yet, as NYT columnist Paul Krugman explains, “…While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.” Krugman provides examples to back up his assertion.
“Pro-business” New Democratic Coalition is preparing new initiatives to cut deals with Republicans, reports Lauren French at Politico.
Yes, it’s early, but if anyone needed another reason why Dems should not relax their efforts in the wake of the Trump follies distraction, here’s one: “We predict that the Democratic nominee for president will win the election by the slimmest of margins with precisely 270 electoral votes. The Republican nominee will fall just short with 268 votes,” says Mark Zandi, writing at the Street about the prediction off Moody’s Analytics presidential election model, which “is constructed based on presidential election results since the 1980 Reagan-Carter contest, and captures the impact on voting decisions of the health of state economies in the lead-up to the election as well as the party affiliation and political realities in each state.”
Shell quits ALEC. That’s one gas brand you can put in your car that doesn’t subsidize Republican legislation through ALEC with your money every few days. Same for BP. However, ExxonMobil still funds ALEC, as does AMOCO and Chevron, Texaco and Marathon.

For cord-cutters and others who missed the Republican presidential debates last night, you can watch clips gratis at Fox News. For a blow by blow analysis, however, you can’t do better than Ed Kilgore’s live-blogging at The Washington Monthly, which political wonks and junkies will be perusing for further clues throughout the day. Kilgore has other perceptive posts on the debate and the Fox News’s relentless attack against Trump here, here and here.
In addition to Trump’s increased leverage, the trans-media consensus seems to be that one clear winner was…Carly Fiorina, who used her spot in the ‘happy hour” pre-debate to amp up her political persona as one of the more sober candidates. Despite her dubious track record as a business leader, Fiorina may have at least secured a spot on the short list of veep candidates. Kilgore however likens her performance to “a former CEO used to doing power-point presentations for stockholders doing her standard speech, amplified by a very lucky question she got about Donald Trump.”
Elsewhere, Michael Barbaro and Nicholas Confessore provide short takes at the New York Times, with plaudits for Rubio, Paul and Kasich. In another Times article Barbaro does an excellent job of showing how boorish was Trump’s performance, almost beyond expectations, although his verbal output at center stage tripled that of the others. He probably enhanced his image as the new face of the GOP, much to the party’s detriment.
At The Times Upshot, Nate Cohn credits Walker and Kasich with “good performances,” and Rubio “the debate’s top performer.” (To me Walker seemed somewhat muffled and Rubio and Kasich just so-so, while Bush did better than I expected).
At WaPo’s The Fix, Chris Cillizza’s “Winners and losers from the first Republican presidential debate” credits Ben Carson with the best closing statement, and puts Rubio Kasich and Fiorina in the winner’s circle. WaPo’s Stephen Stromberg argues that Christie, Kasich and Rubio “won the debate,” while the Post’s Jonathan Capehart gives the nod to Rubio and Fiorina.
Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. adds, “I saw three shows tonight during Fox News’ Republican debate: The Trump Show, The Kasich Dissent, and Everybody Else. Among those in that last category, Jeb Bush had a good night, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had his moments, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) won more friends.”
In “Three Takeaways From the GOP Debate” the Wall St. Journal says Walker, Rubio, Kasich and Bush looked the most “presidential.”
Of course pundit consensus will not necessarily be reflected in opinion polls or election results going forward — especially when the wild card is a joker named Trump. While Trump may not have what it takes to be elected president, his refusal to rule out a run as a write-in Independent could make him a potential kingmaker. That prospect makes the GOP strategists and their minions at Fox News very nervous.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the anniversary is likely to be overshadowed by the first major televised debates of Republican presidential candidates. The big debate, the one with the candidates leading in the polls, with Donald Trump and nine others, will be broadcast from Cleveland at 8:50 EDT. There will also be a sort of a pre-game ‘weenie bowl’ broadcast at 5 pm for the 7 candidates who didn’t make the top ten cut, but it’s unclear who will show up for that unhappy affair (Would you?). In any event, the hope is that all of the candidates who participate will be at least asked to address GOP-driven voter suppression on the day our nation commemorates one of the most significant milestones in the history of democracy. For those who can bear it, Fox News is providing an “Election HQ 2016 app.”
Ari Berman, political correspondent for The Nation and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” has an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why the Voting Rights Act Is Once Again Under Threat.” Berman notes that, despite growing protests against voter suppression in NC and other states, “The voting rights landscape today most closely resembles the period before 1965, when the blight of voting discrimination could be challenged only on a torturous case-by-case basis.”
Greg Speed, president, America Votes and America Votes Action Fund, writes at HuffPo: “While there is little prospect of congressional action on strengthening the VRA in the near future, there has been a growing trend of state legislation building modern, more accessible voting systems signaling hope for breaking down some barriers to minority voters and other segments of the electorate…Colorado, Oregon and California have excelled in the movement to modernize election systems with significant changes, such as automatic mail ballots and, in Oregon, automatic voter registration….This year, states like Florida, New Mexico and Indiana also took important steps forward by enacting election modernization laws with strong bipartisan support. America Votes was deeply engaged in the push for online registration in Florida and New Mexico, where state and local officials from both parties strongly supported online voter registration…Seeing bipartisan support in states this year for online registration and other laws expanding early voting, rights restoration and Election Day registration is very encouraging. ”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent reports on a new Washington Post poll: “…A large majority of Americans now thinks the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights… 52-43. There’s been a big shift towards seeing a need for more racial change among whites overall (now at 53-44) and independents (62-34)…But Republicans and conservatives differ with majority sentiment: majorities of Republicans (63-34) and conservatives (52-46) say that the country has already made “the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
Facing South’s Sue Sturgis has “A Texas-sized reminder of why the Voting Rights Act still matters.” One of her revealing stats: “While the GOP majority in the Texas legislature claimed rampant voter fraud makes strict photo ID rules necessary, number of people who have actually been accused of such ballot fraud since 2004: 4.”
Adel M. Stan reports at The American Prospect on the Koch Brothers grovelfest last week and “why Jeb Bush’s Pitch to the Koch brothers Should Scare You.” Stan defines the stakes in 2016 for Bush in particular. But it could also apply to most of the other GOP presidential candidates: “…The election of a president who is ready to make life easier for the biggest hoarders of private capital could be devastating to any shred of democracy left in our political system…The appointment of Supreme Court justices by a president who holds the shrouded workings of private capital in such high esteem promises future decisions that will make Citizens United look like a ray of sunlight…In his bid to become the third in his family’s dynasty of mediocrity to occupy the White House, Jeb Bush is ready to sell the nation to the most secretive corner of the 1 percent…With masses of private capital to back him–routed through the Kochs’ opaquely funded nonprofits–he could actually win.”
Republicans switching parties to become, gasp, Democrats? It happens …sometimes, reports Nathan L. Gonzales at Rothenblog.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster crunch some polling data at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and observe “Democratic and Republican primary voters in 2016 are likely to be drawn disproportionately from the angriest segment of each party’s base and that candidates who can tap into that anger are likely to do well…No matter who wins the Democratic and Republican nominations next year, we can expect anger at the opposing party’s candidate to run high, and we can expect both parties’ nominees to seek to tap into this anger in order to energize and mobilize their supporters. It promises to be a long and nasty campaign.”
Hey Republicans, you really think this guy can manage America’s budget?